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Preloaded are an interactive company based in London. They make games and exhibits for a range of companies including the science museum and channel 4.

I would love to work there.

They make lots of very cool games, one in particular is called launch ball. This is a physics game made for the science museum to teach basic physics principles to the 8 – 14 age range in a fun, playful manner. I really enjoy playing it and I am much older than the target age range, since the whole game is fun and challenging to play through.

Essentially, you have to place blocks in the right places to complete a circuit and move a ball from one part of the screen to the other. The circuits range from simple electrical circuits powering fans, to heat cells that unlock barriers and melt ice. It’s gloriously addictive and simple fun that makes it super playable.

And that’s what I’m basing my AR idea on.

The idea is to make an AR exhibit thing that uses physics puzzles in a manner similar to launch ball. But instead of moving blocks around with the mouse, the AR tags are the blocks and you position them on a grid infront of the screen.

I know I would play around with this, and could see something like this in museums.

It needs a way to detect if people are playing or not though, but with some of the things I’ve learned recently about the FLARManager, I don’t think this will be much of a problem at all. More on that soon.

It needs levels too. And a physics engine. Should it be 3d or 2d? What style should I use? These questions and more to be answered by me at some point in the future.

But detecting the distance between markers so that circuits can built is done. YEAH! That is like the hardest part in my mind. I have a papervision 3d book which can help me set up jiglib, the open source physics library for PV3D so, I’m sure it’ll work.

Just need to put it all together.

Anyway, here’s a launch ball video, because if you havn’t seen it, you need to. This is the iphone version because theres no good videos that I can embed here.